A few thoughts on Outwitters

[onealexleft]

Thanks for the feedback and compliments!

(07-10-2012 06:29 PM)Sichas Wrote:  1) Holy cow this game is incredible! This is the iOS game I've been wanting to buy since the App Store launched in 2008, but I didn't know exactly how I wanted it. This is definitely it. 5 stars rated.

Thanks!

(07-10-2012 06:29 PM)Sichas Wrote:  2) Issue: Chat is not synchronous across all devices. I switch between my iPhone and iPad quite often during the day, and if I sent 10 messages from my iPhone, I'll have 10 little bubbles to go check on my iPad, just so they go away. If that could be changed so that unless there's a NEW message from the time my account last checked that chat, that would be swell. GameCenter may be a limiting factor on that, however.

It's definitely annoying, especially if you play on one device for a while before switching. Can't promise anything at this moment, but it's definitely something we're aware of and hope to fix in the future.

(07-10-2012 06:29 PM)Sichas Wrote:  4) Oh my goodness the "must resign on your turn" thing has to go!! 7 days is WAY too long to wait on people who stop playing, and then there's nothing I can do about it. Honestly, I'd rather take the loss. I would hazard to say 2 days of no movement for league play and 1 day for casual. (I.e. I finish my turn in a casual game, my opponent has 24 hours to hit the "done" button) A "second chance" solution would maybe be to archive the in-progress game so that the late player could choose to take their turn later, but it wouldn't still be in my queue unless they DID decide to play it. Essentially, I don't care what happens as long as the game isn't taking up space in my list.

Games have been shortened to a max of 4 days. We're working on the 'giving up' out of turn portion as well.

(07-10-2012 06:29 PM)Sichas Wrote:  6) I'm not knowledgeable at all about what your private server setup is like, so I don't know how hard the server is being hit with this game or how much space all of the games take up. If you coded your own back end server, I would hazard to say that everything to and from the client is parsed as a data array to be stored, and I can't imagine that 1 game would take up more than 2MB. (If that's wrong or you do something different, I'd love to hear your solution, just one dev to another. I love comparing strategies) So that said, what would increasing the game cap beyond 20 do to your servers? This largely fits with #4, and I'm going to create a side-bullet point to combine the problems more effectively.

The game is run primarily off of Google App Engine. Which means we pay for server-time, data, processing, etc. Like we mentioned in the witter's digest, we're looking into increasing this in the near future. If you want more technical details you can PM me and we can take the conversation to e-mail.